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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In May, I went with a friend to see the Canadian indie-rock band Arcade Fire perform at the United Palace, a gilded rococo church in Washington Heights that seats more than three thousand and doubles as a theatre. The band was playing to a noisily receptive crowd during what has been a very successful year. Arcade Fire's latest album, "Neon Bible," which was released here in March, has sold more than three hundred thousand copies--an impressive number for an indie band during an industry-wide sales slump--and the group was on its second visit to New York in three months.
The band, six men and three women, shared the stage with half a dozen curved screens and slender red fluorescent lights, which encircled the musicians like a ring of candles. In January, at a less elaborate show in a small London church, the band's members had called to mind Salvation Army volunteers who had forgotten to go home after Christmas--their execution was ragged but full of brio--and I had spent the evening happily pressed against the stage. At the United Palace, even though the music was surging in all the right places, I was weary after six songs. My friend asked me, "Do they play everything in the same end-of-the-world style?"
Arcade Fire's singer and songwriter, Win Butler, writes lyrics that allude to big, potentially buzz-killing themes: guilt, rapture, death, redemption. And because, for the most part, he deals convincingly with these ideas, the band has been likened to older bands known for passion and gravitas, including the Clash. (On tour, Arcade Fire sometimes plays a cover of the Clash's anti-police-brutality anthem "Guns of Brixton.")
By the time I saw the Clash, in 1981, it was finished with punk music. It had just released "Sandinista!," a three-LP set consisting of dub, funk, rap, and Motown interpretations, along with other songs that were indebted--at least in their form--to Jamaican and African-American sources. As I watched Arcade Fire, I realized that the drummer and the bassist rarely played syncopated patterns or lingered in the low registers. If there is a trace of soul, blues, reggae, or funk in Arcade Fire, it must be philosophical; it certainly isn't audible. And what I really wanted to hear, after a stretch of raucous sing-alongs, was a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies--in other words, attributes of African-American popular music.
There's no point in faulting Arcade Fire for what it doesn't do; what's missing from the band's musical DNA is missing from dozens of other popular and accomplished rock bands' as well--most of them less entertaining than Arcade Fire. I've spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century? These are the volatile elements that launched rock and roll, in the nineteen-fifties, when Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the...
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